


Scars

by itsamagicalplace



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Injury discussion, kind of sad and angsty, one use of strong language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-04
Updated: 2014-07-04
Packaged: 2018-02-07 10:17:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1895322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itsamagicalplace/pseuds/itsamagicalplace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Patching Melinda up once again, Phil notices some scars he’s never seen before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scars

**Author's Note:**

> Written for my Tumblr 100 follower celebration.

Melinda did her job well, better than most other agents, yet Phil always seemed to find himself patching her up in one way or another.

They were sat in a hotel room somewhere off the Vegas strip. It was early evening, and they’d been back in the room for around twenty minutes. Their latest mission, to track and associate with a known target, had not ended well. The guy had somehow known they were S.H.I.E.L.D, despite their undercover identities, and following an eventful chase involving one motorbike, three gunshots, and jumping through a glass window, they had been forced to pull back and let him escape. They’d returned to the hotel shortly afterwards, wound up and annoyed, and after the adrenaline had worn off Melinda realised she was bleeding.

“It’s from that window, the glass has sliced through my top…and skin” she muttered, examining the cut across her lower stomach.

“You’ll need stitches, one sec.”

Phil fetched the first aid kit they carried with them on every mission as she sat on the edge of the bed. That kit had served its purpose well over the years, with each of them stitching up the other on multiple occasions. It was kind of their thing.

He returned from the bathroom and knelt down in front of her.

“You’re going to need to take your vest off.”

With anyone else, this could have been awkward, but it wasn’t. They’d been there too many times and had too much shared history for it to be awkward.

She smirked slightly, before removing her top in one motion, her eyes not leaving his. She knew from past experience that he’d keep his composure despite her practically stripping in front of him, and she loved that. They trusted each other so much.

He worked carefully and methodically, first cleaning the blood away, before sterilising the wound and stitching the edges together carefully and neatly. They had no anaesthetic, and it hurt, but she’d had worse. She could deal with some stitches. He pulled the wound back together well, having had plenty of experience, but it would still more than likely leave a scar. For some reason Melinda found that her skin scarred easily, leaving her visible reminders of the danger they faced every day. She had scars in her mind too, but they were hidden away from view. Just the way she liked them.

“I’ve done it as neat as I can, but it’ll probably still scar” he told her, finishing off with a dab of alcohol to cleanse the area.

“Just another to add to the collection” she murmured, watching as he put away the first aid box. 

“Yeah.” He sighed, and sat on his heels looking at her. “Quite a collection growing isn’t there?”

It wasn’t harsh. He had his own scars.

“I mean, there’s this one, and then, there’s this one…” He traced the scar on her left shoulder where Russo had stabbed her, pushing down the loathing he felt when he thought about that man hurting Melinda. That had healed now, a thin line being the only evidence of it ever having happened. “I stitched that.”

She smiled, remembering the moment. She’d not let Ward near her when he’d offered to help, but Phil, well, she’d let him without question. They’d sat in the quiet, talking, and he’d sewed her up again. She’d wanted to kiss him then, but she hadn’t.

He moved his fingers across to her right arm, where she’d been shot by HYDRA.

“And this one.”

He remembered how angry he had been at the time, thinking she’d betrayed him, but still wanting to help her. He’d virtually ripped the bullet out, hard. She’d told him then that she cared for him. The only time she’d ever said that. He still felt guilty about throwing it back at her, no matter how often she told him to leave it.

She sat in silence watching him trace the years of S.H.I.E.L.D across her body. He knew all these scars. He’d either been there or heard about it soon after.

He moved to stand, and she thought they were done, but he simply sat on the bed behind her, and traced a jagged scar across the top of her back. She’d got that when they’d attempted to tackle an enemy insurgent whilst undercover on the beach. Needless to say a bikini had done nothing to protect against a concrete slab being thrown from a window at them. He smiled at the memory. They’d been so young then. So carefree.

She felt his fingers pause on her back, and she froze. She knew what he’d seen.

His fingertips moved down, and brushed lightly across her lower back. She knew which scars he was tracing now. She should have stopped him. He’d never seen these. She’d never wanted him to.

She swallowed, knowing it was too late.

“Melinda….” She could feel his breath on her back as his fingertips settled over the two round scars at the base of her spine. “Are…are these gunshots?” he murmured quietly.

She didn’t reply. How could she? Their lives had been intertwined since the Academy. They’d always shared everything; every mission, every problem, every dream. But then Bahrain had happened and Melinda had become…lost. She’d pushed him away. He didn’t know she’d got these; he didn’t know she’d been shot.

The fact she hadn’t replied gave him his answer anyway. She could almost feel his shock, despite not facing him.

He swallowed hard.

“From when?”

She couldn’t keep it from him now. It wasn’t as though it were secret, more that there had never been a time to randomly slip into conversation that she’d been shot years earlier.

“Kuwait. Almost 5 years back.”

“Kuwait…”

“The mission went sideways, the target took three agents hostage…. I was lucky.”

In the back of his mind Phil was recalling something about a top-secret mission going tits up a few years back – he’d only been level 6 at the time, so he’d not known who had been on the mission, the purpose it had held, and what had gone wrong. He knew enough about S.H.I.E.L.D too to not ask questions. He’d had no idea May had been on that team, and that she had been injured so badly. His brain was going into overdrive.

“Lucky?” he murmured. “You got shot, in the back, twice. I wouldn’t exactly call that lucky.”

“I survived. The other agents didn’t.”

He didn’t have a response to that one. They sat in silence for a few minutes, his fingertips gently caressing the skin at the base of her spine, tracing the circular scars like he was committing them to memory.

“I didn’t know” he whispered. She could hear the pain in his voice. She knew she’d been wrong to keep it from him, but there had never been a good time to bring it back up. Once she’d returned, and was back on duty, they saw each other even less, and Bahrain still haunted her so much that she later transferred to administration. Then Phil had been killed by Loki, Fury had him resurrected, and then this team had been formed. When was she supposed to bring up the fact she’d been shot five years previous?

“I didn’t tell you.”

“Why?” It hurt; somewhere deep inside him it hurt that she’d never told him, even if he knew the reason.

He could hear her sigh gently, and watched her shoulders drop slightly before she spoke.

“We weren’t…we weren’t close anymore Phil.”

Bahrain had happened around eight years ago. After that, she had pushed him away. He knew it hadn’t been on purpose, but part of her had been lost that day, and she’d never fully recovered. Afterwards they had drifted – she went on missions and he went on missions and sometimes they spoke about it, but not like they used to. She was right, they had once been inseparable, but after what happened, they weren’t close anymore.

“Even so…you should have told me Melinda…you were shot!” He was almost annoyed, but couldn’t work out why. After all, it was her business if she wanted to divulge her injuries from previous missions.

“I survived.” She repeated the sentence again. What more could she say? It had been another memory she’d tried to bury deep within her mind, drawing on it only when she needed the anger and adrenaline for an enemy take-down.

“You were in hospital?”

She paused. She’d known he was going to ask her these questions one day, but she wasn’t ready. Would she ever be? Not for the truth. Not to tell Phil the full truth, about what had happened, and what that day had taken away from her when she’d already lost so much.

“Yes.”

“How long for?”

“A while.”

Phil could tell she was avoiding answering properly.

“How long Melinda?”

She shook her head slowly. “Three months almost.”

“For gunshots?” He took a deep breath. “Shit May, what else happened?”

He knew from experience that that kind of injury, whilst taking a long time to heal, also usually had the patient at home in recovery within around four weeks. Three months was a long time. Unusually long. Three months meant something else.

“There were…complications.”

There was something in the way her voice caught slightly on the last word that made Phil think there was more to the story than she was letting on. A lot more. Complications? He could hear the pain bubbling to the surface in her words. She always tried to hide it. Never let herself show weakness. She was pulling away from him, going to stand up, when he reached out and held gently onto her waist with both hands. He wasn’t sure whether to keep pressing her, or to end the conversation there and then. But he wanted to know. He needed to know how badly she really had been injured, when he hadn’t been there to patch her up. He knew she’d stop talking when she didn’t want to reveal any more.

“Bad?”

She settled back on the edge of the bed, and sighed. This was another thing she had buried deep in her mind. Something she’d never told another agent. Ever. The only other person had been her mother.

“Pretty bad. But like I said, I’m alive.”

“At what cost?”

She finally turned around to face him, and he could see from the sheen of her eyes that she was trying not to cry. Melinda never cried. Whatever had happened, it had hurt. She shook her head slightly, and the smile she gave him was small. Sad.

“Phil…I….”

He took her face in his hands, and gently wiped the single teardrop that fell, off her cheek. She looked at him, so caring, pleading to understand, and she knew she had to tell him.

“The doctors said I had irreparable internal damage to the lower abdomen, due to the resulting scar tissue of both the original impact injury and the following surgery. The scar tissue makes any form of conception an extremely unlikely possibility in my future.”

She shrugged her shoulders and looked away again, as though brushing it aside.

It was like she had memorised what they had told her, word for word, and when Phil decoded it, what she was saying finally clicked in his head.

“You can’t get pregnant.” It wasn’t a question. He knew as soon as he said the words he was right.

“No.”

The words spun round his head. He’d never known. Why would he? He’d never considered it. He could feel anger brewing. This was wrong. Things like this, she didn’t deserve it. To spend your whole life working to protect people, only to be denied something like that…

“I’m…I’m so sorry” he whispered, his lips brushing against her shoulder.

“It’s okay, I’m not exactly motherly and nurturing and…fluffy.” He could hear her smirking slightly at the latter words and had to smile too, despite himself.

“You are. You just…hide it well, you know, through all the sarcasm and eye-rolling.”

She turned to face him again, all traces of tears gone from her face. She punched him gently and smiled.

“Shut up.”

He watched her smile, but could still see the pain behind it. He’d always seen through her.

“I more than likely wouldn’t’ve had the chance to have a family anyway doing this for a living” she murmured. “But it would have been nice to not have the option taken away by some pissed off soldier with a grudge against humanity.”

“That’s why you almost killed Quinn in the BUS holding cell? Not just because he shot Skye, but because of where he shot her” he realised suddenly. Things were falling into place. He had never really understood why Melinda had gone for Quinn as fiercely as she had done – other than releasing anger – but here it was: Skye too could have ended up with scar tissue just as May had.

“Yeah. When he shot her I just saw red, red and more red. I mean, if she ends up with similar problems then I….I don’t know I just -”

He took her hands in his own, and she frowned.

“She deserves a future Phil. A family. He can’t take that away from her. I hope he hasn’t. I know what it feels like and I don’t want her to have that.”

“You have the team. Everyone on that BUS thinks of you as nurturing you know that right? Skye sees you as a mother-figure, and Fitzsimmons look up to you too.”

“They’re afraid of me.”

“Not now, maybe at first, but not now.”

He reached out and stroked a stray piece of hair from her face.

“You have a family with us Melinda. You always will, please know that. You have Skye, Fitzsimmons, hell, even Trip. And…” he paused before leaning closer to her. “You have me.”

She smiled. She had always had Phil there by her side – that was true. But only ever really as a friend. She wanted more. It was selfish and not like her, but she wanted him. All of him. She wanted…well she wanted love, but…he had Audrey.

He was watching her, watching her mind play out scenarios in her head, watching as she looked at his lips before glancing back to his eyes.

“You’ve always had me Mel” he whispered. “All of me.” She could hear in his voice, it was like he was telling her that he was hers, like he was reading her mind, but she couldn’t believe him. She couldn’t. He had Audrey. He didn’t like her in that way. Just a friend, like they always had been.

“You have Audrey” she whispered back. They were so close. She could close the distance between them in a second, but it wouldn’t be fair.

“No I don’t. Not anymore. She thinks I’m dead.” He paused for a moment and met her gaze again. “Anyway, she isn’t like you.”

“How so?”

“She’s…” he flustered around for the right word. “Nice.”

“And I’m not?”

“No.” The word came out before he could stop it. Damn.

She raised her eyebrows at him with a slight smirk. “Thanks.”

“Shit. No. Not what I mean, Mel, not at all, I mean…”

“Go on.” She was watching him carefully now. He was stumbling and mumbling over his words. She loved that. She loved him.

“I mean she is nice. She’s lovely. And kind. And you’re right. I did have her. I loved her. But now? Now I don’t know her.”

He shook his head slowly.

“But you Melinda? You’re strong. And incredible. And you kick ass in the hottest way I’ve ever seen.”

She smirked, and Phil continued to babble.

“Audrey is soft, and delicate, and has no idea about what we really do in S.H.I.E.L.D. I don’t even know if that could work now, even if she knew I was alive. And anyway, I don’t love her anymore. I used to, but even back then I would often get called out on missions when we were together, and I couldn’t tell her where I was going or anything. So I think I knew then, the whole traditional family life would never work anyway.” He took her hands back in his own, and held them tight. “This is my family now.”

She couldn’t believe he was saying these words.

“This team” he continued. “Our team. Skye. Fitzsimmons. Trip. This is family. This is home.” He looked straight into her eyes. “You are home. You are who I want to see every day. You are who I always want to be with.”

She couldn’t stop herself. She leaned forwards, and her lips met his. Softly, gently, they moved their mouths together and she sighed into their kiss. This was perfect. It was right. It was everything they both wanted.

“I love you, Melinda” he whispered against her lips. “I don’t care about anything else anymore. I don’t care that we live on a BUS. I don’t care that we can’t have that traditional life, or a house in the suburbs and children and normal jobs. I don’t care. All I care about is you. And not fucking up running this thing, but other than that –“

“I love you too, Phil.”


End file.
